Tom Hayden: In the '60s, we did overcome

By Tom Hayden

Updated 2035 GMT (0335 HKT) August 25, 2014

Photos: 60 iconic moments from the 1960s61 photos

60 iconic moments from the 1960s – Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll defined the 1960s. But the decade was also a time of pivotal change — politically, socially and technologically. Check out 60 of the most iconic moments of the decade, and then experience "The Sixties" on CNN.

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The 'Greensboro Four' – On February 1, 1960, four African-American college students made history just by sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter at a Woolworth's in Greensboro, North Carolina. Service never came for the "Greensboro Four," as they came to be known, and their peaceful demonstration drew national attention and sparked more "sit-ins" in Southern cities.

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Elvis discharged from the military – Elvis Presley's musical heyday was in the 1950s, but he remained a major star in the 1960s. Here, Presley, 25, is pictured with his future wife, Priscilla, shortly before his discharge from the U.S. Army in 1960. Presley served two years in the Army.

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Sharpeville massacre in South Africa – Wounded people in South Africa's Sharpeville township lie in the street on March 21, 1960, after police opened fire on black demonstrators marching against the country's segregation system known as apartheid. At least 180 black Africans, most of them women and children, were injured and 69 were killed in the Sharpeville massacre that signaled the start of armed resistance against apartheid.

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The laser is born – Theodore Maiman pours liquid nitrogen into a cooling unit around one of the first experimental lasers in his laboratory in Santa Monica, California. Maiman's ruby laser, created on May 16, 1960, is considered to be one of the top technological achievements of the 20th century. It paved the way for fiber-optic communications, CDs, DVDs and sight-restoring surgery.

Nixon-Kennedy debate – The first televised presidential debate was on September 26, 1960, and it involved U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon, left, and Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts. The debate is largely credited with helping to make a star out of Kennedy, who won the election later that year.

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Bay of Pigs invasion – Cuban leader Fidel Castro, lower right, sits inside a tank near Playa Giron, Cuba, during the Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17, 1961. On that day, about 1,500 CIA-backed Cuban exiles landed at Cuba's Bay of Pigs in hopes of triggering an uprising against Castro. It was a complete disaster for President John F. Kennedy's fledgling administration.

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'Sex and the Single Girl' – Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, published her book "Sex and the Single Girl" in 1962. The book helped spark the sexual revolution and popularize the notion that the modern woman could "have it all," including a successful career and a fulfilling sex life.

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First interactive video game – In 1962, Massachusetts Institute of Technology students Steve Russell, Martin "Shag" Graetz and Alan Kotok created "Spacewar!" which is widely considered the first interactive video game. Dueling players fired at each other's spaceships using early versions of joysticks. This photo shows the three "Spacewar!" inventors playing the game at Boston's Computer Museum in 1983.

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'Turn on, tune in, drop out' – The drug LSD became popular in the 1960s, leading the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to designate it an experimental drug in 1962. Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary, pictured here, became an advocate for the drug, coining the phrase, "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

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First James Bond movie – Before Daniel Craig or Pierce Brosnan, there was Sean Connery, who starred in the first James Bond film, "Dr. No," in 1962. With the most recent Bond film released in 2012 ("Skyfall"), the James Bond series is the longest running film series of all time.

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Marilyn Monroe dies – Actress Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her apartment on August 5, 1962, at the age of 36. Officials ruled her death as probable suicide from sleeping pill overdose, but to this day there remain many conspiracy theories.

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Spider-Man arrives – The No. 15 issue of the "Amazing Fantasy" comic book series, published August 10, 1962, marked the first appearance of Spider-Man. The issue is one of the most valuable comics of all time.

Cuban missile crisis – U.S. President John F. Kennedy delivers a nationally televised address about the Cuban missile crisis on October 22, 1962. After learning that the Soviet Union had begun shipping missiles to Cuba, Kennedy announced a strategic blockade of Cuba and warned the Soviet Union that the U.S. would seize any more deliveries.

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Boeing 727 debuts – Crowds in Seattle gather for the first viewing of the Boeing 727 jet in December 1962. The aircraft's first flight would take place on February 9, 1963. The 727 is credited with opening the door to domestic travel for millions of everyday Americans.

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Polaroid adds color – Inventor Edwin Land, president and co-founder of the Polaroid Corporation, demonstrates his company's new instant-color film in 1963.

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'The Feminine Mystique' – Betty Friedan energized the feminist movement in 1963 with her book "The Feminine Mystique." The book detailed the frustration of women who were expected to rely on their husbands and children for their happiness.

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Patsy Cline's death – Patsy Cline performs at Nashville's Grand Ole Opry in this undated photo. The country music star and three others were killed in a plane crash March 5, 1963, near Camden, Tennessee.

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The Beatles' first album – The Beatles released their first album, "Please Please Me," in the United Kingdom on March 22, 1963. Here, the band is honored on November 18, 1963, for the massive sales of albums "Please Please Me" and "With the Beatles."

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Alabama governor resists desegregation – Federal Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, standing on the right, confronts Alabama Gov. George Wallace at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa on June 11, 1963. Wallace is standing in the doorway to prevent two African-American students from entering despite a presidential order. Wallace, who was pro-segregation, later stood aside.

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Medgar Evers assassinated – Myrlie Evers, widow of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, comforts their son Darrell while their daughter, Reena, wipes her tears during Evers' funeral on June 18, 1963. Evers was assassinated days earlier at his home in Jackson, Mississippi.

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JFK's Berlin speech – U.S. President John F. Kennedy delivers his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a Berliner") speech to a massive crowd in West Berlin on June 26, 1963.

Cronkite becomes anchor – Walter Cronkite sits behind the news desk on the set of the "CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite" in August 1963. One month later, it became network television's first nightly half-hour news program.

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Birmingham church bombing – A coffin is loaded into a hearse at a funeral in Birmingham, Alabama, for victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Four African-American girls were killed and at least 14 others were wounded when a bomb blast tore through church services on September 15, 1963. Three former Ku Klux Klan members were later convicted of murder for the bombing.

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First push-button phone – The first push-button telephone was made available to AT&T customers on November 18, 1963. The phone had extension buttons at the bottom for office use.

Instant replay debuts – CBS used instant replay for the first time during the airing of the Army-Navy game that took place December 7, 1963, in Philadelphia's Municipal Stadium.

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Berlin Wall opens – More than two years after it was constructed, the Berlin Wall opened for the first time on December 20, 1963, allowing citizens of West Berlin to visit their relatives in communist East Berlin.

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Warhol and pop art – Artist Andy Warhol stands in the doorway of his studio, the Factory, in 1964, holding the acetate he used to make his famous Marilyn Monroe paintings. Warhol's work centered on famous personalities and iconic American objects, making him a leading figure in the pop art movement.

Ali becomes heavyweight champ – Boxer Muhammad Ali — then known as Cassius Clay — upsets Sonny Liston in a heavyweight title fight in Miami Beach, Florida, on February 25, 1964. He was 22 years old. A short time later, Clay joined the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Muhammad Ali.

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Ford Mustang debuts – The 1965 Ford Mustang was first officially revealed to the public at the 1964 World's Fair in New York. Standard equipment included carpet, bucket seats and a 170-cubic-inch, six-cylinder engine that was coupled with a three-speed floor-shift transmission. With a price that started at just under $2,400, the car captured America's affection and is still being produced today.

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Mandela sentenced to life in prison – South African resistance leader Nelson Mandela, left, talks to Cape Town teacher C Andrews in 1964. On June 12, 1964, Mandela was sentenced to life in prison for four counts of sabotage. He was released 27 years later, and when apartheid ended he became the country's first black president.

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Civil Rights Act of 1964 – After signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson shakes hands with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The legislation outlawed discrimination in public places and banned discrimination based on race, gender, religion or national origin. It also encouraged the desegregation of public schools.

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'Daisy Girl' ad – "Peace, Little Girl," a 1964 political ad for U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, was arguably the most famous — and the most negative — campaign ad in U.S. history. The ad, which played only once, showed a little girl counting daisy petals before an image of a nuclear explosion. Known as the "Daisy Girl" ad, it was credited with helping Johnson defeat U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater in the landslide 1964 election.

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U.S. troops in South Vietnam – On February 9, 1965, the United States deployed its first combat troops to South Vietnam, significantly escalating its role in the war. Here, the U.S. Marines' 163rd Helicopter Squadron discharges South Vietnamese troops for an assault against the Viet Cong hidden along the tree line in the background.

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Malcolm X assassinated – Civil rights activist Malcolm X is carried from the Audubon Ballroom in New York, where he had just been shot on February 21, 1965. He died shortly after.

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'Bloody Sunday' – State troopers swing batons to break up a civil rights voting march in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965. "Bloody Sunday," as it became known, helped fuel the drive for passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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Voting Rights Act – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson hands a pen to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965. The landmark legislation helped protect minorities who had previously encountered unfair barriers to voting.

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The Watts Riots – Two youths, carrying lampshades from a looted store, run down a street in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles on August 13, 1965. The Watts Riots were sparked by tensions between the city's black residents and police. The six days of violence left 34 dead and resulted in $40 million of property damage.

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'Batman' – The "Batman" TV series debuted in 1966, starring Adam West as the Caped Crusader and Burt Ward as his sidekick, Robin. The show aired for only three seasons, but it was a pop culture sensation at the time and a cult classic for future generations. There was also a feature film in 1966.

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China's Cultural Revolution – Chinese leader Mao Zedong, standing front and center, rides through a Tiananmen Square rally in Beijing in 1966. In May of that year, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution to enforce communism and get rid of old institutions and his political enemies. The political movement careened out of control and led to massive political purges, deaths and destruction before it ended in 1976.

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First Super Bowl – The Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs played the first Super Bowl on January 15, 1967, in Los Angeles. The Packers won the football game 35-10.

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Six-Day War – Israeli soldiers stand in front of the Western Wall on June 9, 1967, in the old city of Jerusalem following its recapture from Jordanian rule in the Six-Day War.

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Marshall on Supreme Court – Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, with his family at his side, takes his seat at the court for the first time on October 2, 1967. Marshall was the first African-American to be appointed to the high court.

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Anti-Vietnam protests – A demonstrator offers a flower to military police at the Pentagon during an anti-Vietnam protest in Washington on October 21, 1967. Marches such as this one helped turn public opinion against the war.

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First human heart transplant – Dr. Christiaan Barnard is shown after performing the first human heart transplant on patient Louis Washkansky on December 3, 1967, in Cape Town, South Africa.

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Tet Offensive – South Vietnamese Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the national police, executes suspected Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem — also known as Bay Lop — on a Saigon street on February 1, 1968. It was early in the Tet Offensive, one of the largest military campaigns of the Vietnam War.

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My Lai massacre – Houses in My Lai, South Vietnam, burn during the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968. American troops came to the remote hamlet and killed hundreds of unarmed civilians. The incident, one of the darkest moments of the Vietnam War, further increased opposition to U.S. involvement in the war.

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Martin Luther King assassinated – This photo was taken on April 4, 1968, moments after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed by a sniper as he stood on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. King was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers.

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Robert F. Kennedy assassinated – U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of former President John F. Kennedy, was shot shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, in Los Angeles. Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of assassinating Kennedy and wounding five other people inside the kitchen service pantry of the former Ambassador Hotel.

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Democratic National Convention unrest – Members of the New York delegation protest against the Vietnam War during the 1968 Democratic National Convention held in Chicago. Outside, riots erupted, with tens of thousands of Vietnam War protesters clashing with Chicago police and National Guard forces.

First men on the moon – Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin E. "Buzz" Aldrin Jr. salutes the U.S. flag on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969. Aldrin and mission commander Neil Armstrong became the first humans to walk on the moon. Their mission was considered an American victory in the Cold War and subsequent space race, meeting President Kennedy's goal of "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely" before the end of the decade.

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Woodstock Music Festival – Singer Roger Daltrey and guitarist Pete Townshend of The Who perform on stage at the Woodstock Music Festival in Bethel, New York. An estimated 400,000 people attended the festival, which took place in August 1969.

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Manson murders – Cult leader Charles Manson is taken into court to face murder charges on December 5, 1969, in Los Angeles. At Manson's command, a small group of his most ardent followers brutally murdered five people at the Los Angeles home of film director Roman Polanski on August 8-9, 1969, including Polanski's pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate. Manson was convicted for orchestrating the murders and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life in prison.

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Forebear of the Internet – With the help of a handful of leading universities and other labs, work began on a project to directly link a number of computers. In 1969, with money from the U.S. Defense Department, the first node of this network was installed on the campus of UCLA. The diagram shows the "network of networks" of ARPANET, as it was called. The forebear of the Internet was born. What did the '60s look like to you? Share your photos here.

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Story highlights

Shocks and jolts of 1960s transformed Tom Hayden from student advocate to radical

Early activists of '60s stayed true to belief that system could be changed from within, he says

Hayden says disillusionment grew over Vietnam, repression led to underground outside law

Most activists re-entered everyday life after decade's key battles won, he says

Shortly before he was murdered, Robert Kennedy was underlining this passage from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"When you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not try to weakly reconcile yourself with the world. ... Adhere to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age."

These were the questions we all asked ourselves in the tumult of the 1960s: Whether to "weakly reconcile" to the status quo of our parents' world, or break the monotony by actions that might seem "strange and extravagant." Like sitting quietly at a Greensboro lunch counter while frothing racists pushed cigarettes into unbent necks.

Or striking a match to our draft cards when we saw Buddhist monks burning themselves in Vietnam. Or coming out of one closet after another. Or facing baton-wielding troops driving jeeps with barbed wire toward 20-somethings at the 1968 Democratic National Convention I asked such questions in my own life back then. I grew up as a Catholic idealist whose innate curiosity drew me to investigative journalism. As a young man, I hitchhiked from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Berkeley, California, in 1960 on the trail of the Beat Generation.

Tom Hayden

I was most inspired by those young people of my generation who found a cause worth dying for on the civil rights battlefields of the American South. I interviewed a young Martin Luther King Jr. in 1960 while he picketed the Democratic convention in Los Angeles demanding a civil rights plank. Frankly, I wanted to get a front-page story. He was so patient and logical in answering my questions that it made me consider putting down my pen for a placard. Gradually my journalism became advocacy, my advocacy turned to activism.

In 1962, I drafted the manifesto of the Students for a Democratic Society, or SDS, known as the Port Huron Statement, defining young people as agents of social change and calling for participatory democracy. I was enlisted as a Freedom Rider in Georgia, then became a door-knocking community organizer in the slums of Newark, New Jersey, and for 10 years an angry opponent of the Vietnam War. In eight years, I was transformed from being a student editor advocating for the Peace Corps to a dangerous menace in the mind of the FBI.

The government responded to protests such as mine with accusations of terrorism and prosecution for conspiracy. As the repression grew, so did the length of my hair and my sympathies toward revolution.

Similar to a natural birth, the birth of the '60s contained the joyous power of creation. And like all births, there was blood and danger. As Albert Camus wrote in "The Wager of Our Generation":

"Yes, there was the sun and poverty. ...Next the war and resistance. And, as a result, the temptation of hatred. Seeing beloved friends and relatives killed is not a schooling in generosity. The temptation of hatred had to be overcome. And I did so."

This was a social revolution led by middle-class students but propelled by "the wretched of the Earth" in places such as Cuba, Vietnam, Belfast, Selma and Oakland. The rising started without a press release and little press notice. Allen Ginsberg read "Howl" at a poetry reading in San Francisco because he, along with Jack Kerouac and now-famous others, were having trouble getting poetry published.

Neither was there any significant coverage of the February 1, 1960, sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina. The four students at the Woolworth's counter had "no plan whatever." The student civil rights movement simply announced itself.

Our elders' most common response to our actions was repression and force. "Howl" and its City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti were prosecuted for obscenity in 1957. The FBI infested the campuses with thousands of agents searching for secret communists -- or, it turned out, gays, lesbians, philandering professors and alcoholics among the Berkeley faculty. The white-collar Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission worked with the hooded Ku Klux Klan to terrorize people wanting to vote.

Despite these shocks and jolts, the first generation of activists in the 1960s stayed largely true to the hope that our elders were somehow mistaken, that the institutions could be reformed from within with just one more push. That hopeful pragmatism renewed itself with each new wave of protest, for example through the "Clean for Gene" volunteers tramping through the New Hampshire snow for moderate anti-war candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy in 1968.

The "temptation of hatred" predicted by Camus seeped in with Vietnam. The first U.S. aircraft bombed North Vietnam in August 1964, even as some of us were burying the three civil rights workers killed in Mississippi.

A few months later, after the SDS supported Lyndon Johnson because he promised to send no "young American boys" to Southeast Asia, the President did just that. More than 100,000 were sent into combat that first year.

The Vietnam draft got young Americans' attention like nothing before. White students in the North sensed in that moment what it was like to be a black student in the South. And it must not be forgotten today, when lying politicians are taken for granted, that this was the first time a young generation elected a president who lied about sending its own brothers to their deaths after promising not to.

If innocence wasn't dead already, its headstone now read: "Died in Vietnam, 1965."

It was perhaps only accidental that the CIA began covertly distributing LSD in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco the same month that those ground troops were shipped off to Vietnam. A mistake gone out of control, it later said. "Mistake" would become the designation for one dysfunctional disaster after another, Vietnam being the greatest. There were no apologies.

The question remains: Why did so many 20-year-old students recognize that Vietnam was a mistake from the beginning -- from the first campus teach-ins of March 1965 -- while our liberal and conservative elders were so certain that it was a necessary, winnable and affordable war against communism? It was certainly not because the peaceniks and beatniks and women's libbers were connected to the Communist Party. Even the CIA rejected that Cold War reasoning in an exhaustive confidential 1968 report to the President.

We protested because we went through a collective near-death experience when our government and Moscow came close to nuclear war over Cuba in 1962. Like Cuba, we learned that Vietnam was a proxy in the Cold War between the United States and Soviet Union. We instinctively rejected the notion that the world could be divided into two superpower camps.

We protested because of our civil rights experience in the South, where a kind of Third World land reform movement was taking place: Those sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta looked awfully like the Vietnamese rice farmers in the Mekong Delta, inspiring our global solidarity. Muhammad Ali drew a compelling conclusion: "No Viet Cong ever called me nigger."

Resistance to authority grew in the streets by 1966, based more on existentialism than ideology. For those of draft age, the only choices were to serve in a dubious war, take exile in Canada or risk an indefinite prison term.

An underground grew up outside the law, including dissidents from draft evaders to Black Panthers on the run, priests and nuns, marijuana offenders and revolutionary saboteurs. The police and FBI caught few of them, and juries refused to rubber-stamp conspiracy charges in the cases of the Chicago Eight, the Catonsville Nine -- Catholics, including priests Daniel and Philip Berrigan, charged after they burned several hundred draft files -- and many more.

On its side, the state in the late '60s deployed 1,500 federal Army intelligence officers to surveil 100,000 Americans; another 2,000 FBI agents were dispatched to disrupt legal organizations and "neutralize" protest leaders, myself included.

In 1969 alone, I was grazed by death three times.

First, my closest friend and co-author of the Port Huron Statement, Richard Flacks, was assaulted at his university desk in Chicago with a claw hammer and left for dead (he lived on). Second, Bay Area police used live ammunition without announcement in quelling the Berkeley People's Park protests; I watched as they killed a young man named James Rector and permanently blinded his friend Alan Blanchard as they sat on a rooftop. Third, during the Chicago conspiracy trial, the police shot and killed two Black Panthers in their sleep; one of them, Fred Hampton, had attended the trial daily as a liaison to Panther leader Bobby Seale.

Using available data, one can chart a history of the '60s in a rising line, starting from peaceful protest, 1959-64, then a sharply ascending trajectory toward violence (bombings, police-Panther shootouts, Weather Underground, Kent State, etc.) until 1975, when the line flattens out once again (end of the Vietnam War, fall of Richard Nixon). That line illustrates the truth of John F. Kennedy's maxim that "those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."

There came a time in the '70s when the sun surprisingly broke through the darkest storms. Public opinion -- our parents' opinion -- began to loosen and shift. As late as 1969, the Gallup survey showed that 82% of our parents wanted student protesters expelled.

Estranged from my own ex-Marine father for a decade, I learned later that he started shouting at the television that Nixon was a liar. Soon the Democratic Party opened its doors to dissenters. Voting rights were implemented in the South. Jimmy Carter gave amnesty to deserters. Charges were dropped against Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

In addition to the Watergate hearings, Congress woke up and held the first hearings into CIA and FBI law-breaking. The first -- and still strongest -- environmental laws were passed. The Supreme Court upheld Roe v. Wade, affecting millions of our generation, participation or voting rights were expanded to more of the excluded, to farmworkers, the disabled, the 18-year-olds.

Vietnam vets mostly reconciled with Vietnam resisters around what we had in common: We had all been lied to. I entered the mainstream and was elected to serve in the California legislature for two decades despite Republican efforts to expel me. I teach at colleges today, where the students don't know me, unless their parents clue them in.

The '60s ended not because we "grew up," or because we were effectively repressed, but because we won most of the crucial battles that had mobilized so many for so long. When the movement tides receded, most of us quietly re-entered everyday life in a culture we had changed irreversibly. Despite many premature requiems for the '60s, the decade continues to live as legacy.